Michael Pollan
Michael Pollan
Michael Pollan is an American author, journalist, activist, and professor of journalism at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionJournalist
Date of Birth6 February 1955
CityLong Island, NY
CountryUnited States of America
past oil america
To put it bluntly, we now need to reverse course. We need more highly skilled small farmers in more places all across America - not as a matter of nostalgia for the agrarian past but as a matter of national security. For nations that lose the ability to substantially feed themselves will find themselves as gravely compromised in their international dealings as nations that depend on foreign sources of oil presently do. But while there are alternatives to oil, there are no alternatives to food.
thinking interesting want
Nutrition science is where surgery was in about 1650, you know, really interesting and promising, but would you want to have them operate on you yet? I don't think so.
writing finding-the-one phrases
Plus, I love comic writing. Nothing satisfies me more than finding a funny way to phrase something.
cooking important sugar
It's really important for your health, because you will never use as much salt and fat and sugar as a corporation will use cooking for you.
thinking agriculture people
...think of agriculture as something the grasses did to people to conquer the trees.
thinking mcdonalds keys
In corn, I think I've found the key to the American food chain. If you look at a fast-food meal, a McDonald's meal, virtually all the carbon in it - and what we eat is mostly carbon - comes from corn.
party agreement two
The larger meaning here is that mainstream journalists simply cannot talk about things that the two parties agree on; this is the black hole of American politics.
simple thinking long
I still think we have a long way to go on rebuilding a culture of cooking. Everyday simple cooking.
appreciation mistake ignorance
When we mistake what we can know for all there is to know, a healthy appreciation of one's ignorance in the face of a mystery like soil fertility gives way to the hubris that we can treat nature as a machine. Once that leap has been made, one input follows another, so that when the synthetic nitrogen fed to plants makes them more attractive to insects and vulnerable to disease, as we have discovered, the farmer turns to chemical pesticides to fix his broken machine.
leadership issues political
The things journalists should pay attention to are the issues the political leadership agrees on, rather than to their supposed antagonisms.
political eating eco
Eating is a political act.
children thinking talking
I'm not talking about having to consult Julia Child before you can take a pot off the rack. I think that's something we can all do more and do better.
real real-food
The real food is not being advertised
powerful garden carbon-footprint
Measured against the Problem We Face, planting a garden sounds pretty benign, I know, but in fact it's one of the most powerful things an individual can do--to reduce your carbon footprint, sure, but more important, to reduce your sense of dependence and dividedness: to change the cheap-energy mind.